U.S. secretly trains troops in Pakistan

Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

BARA, Pakistan – More than 70 U.S. military advisers and technical specialists are secretly working in Pakistan to help its armed forces battle al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the country's lawless tribal areas, U.S. military officials said.

The Americans are mostly Army Special Forces soldiers who are training Pakistani army and paramilitary troops, providing them with intelligence and advising on combat tactics, the officials said. They do not conduct combat operations, the officials added.

They make up a secret task force overseen by the U.S. Central Command and Special Operations Command. It started last summer, with the support of Pakistan's government and military, in an effort to root out al-Qaeda and Taliban operations that threaten U.S. troops in Afghanistan and are increasingly destabilizing Pakistan. It is a much larger and more ambitious effort than either country has acknowledged.

Pakistani officials have vigorously protested American missile strikes in the tribal areas as a violation of sovereignty and have resisted efforts by Washington to put more troops on Pakistani soil. President Asif Ali Zardari is trying to cope with soaring anti-Americanism among Pakistanis and a belief that he is too close to Washington.

Despite the political hazards for Islamabad, the U.S. effort is beginning to pay dividends.

A new Pakistani commando unit within the Frontier Corps paramilitary force has used information from the CIA and other sources to kill or capture as many as 60 militants in the past seven months, including at least five high-ranking commanders, a senior Pakistani military official said.

Four weeks ago, the commandos captured a Saudi militant linked to al-Qaeda in this town in the Khyber Agency, one of the tribal areas that run along the border with Afghanistan.

Yet the main commanders of the Pakistani Taliban, including their leader, Baitullah Mehsud, and its leader in the Swat region, Maulana Fazlullah, remain at large. And senior American military officials remain frustrated that they have been unable to persuade the chief of the Pakistani army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to embrace serious counterinsurgency training for the army.

Kayani, who is visiting Washington this week as a White House review on policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan gets under way, will almost certainly be asked how the Pakistani military can do more to eliminate al-Qaeda and the Taliban from the tribal areas.

The U.S. officials acknowledge that at the moment when Washington most needs Pakistan's help, the tensions between Pakistan and India since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November have made the Pakistani army less willing to shift its attention to the al-Qaeda and Taliban threat.

Officials from both Pakistan and the United States agreed to disclose some details about the U.S. military advisers and the enhanced intelligence sharing to help dispel impressions that the missile strikes were thwarting broader efforts to combat a common enemy. They spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the powerful anti-American segment of the Pakistani population.

The Pentagon had previously said about two dozen American trainers worked in Pakistan late last year. More than half the members of the new task force are Special Forces advisers; the rest are combat medics, communications experts and other specialists. Both sides are encouraged by the new collaboration between the American and Pakistani military and intelligence agencies against the militants.

Intelligence from Pakistani informants has been used to bolster the accuracy of missile strikes from remotely piloted Predator and Reaper aircraft against the militants in the tribal areas, officials from both countries say.

More than 30 attacks by the aircraft have been conducted since last August, most of them after Zardari took office in September. A senior U.S. military official said that nine of 20 senior al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in Pakistan had been killed by those strikes.